Plurrrr

Thu 08 Oct 2020

We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

During our engagement, we found a variety of vulnerabilities in core portions of their infrastructure that would've allowed an attacker to fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim's iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources.

There were a total of 55 vulnerabilities discovered with 11 critical severity, 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity reports. These severities were assessed by us for summarization purposes and are dependent on a mix of CVSS and our understanding of the business related impact.

As of October 6th, 2020, the vast majority of these findings have been fixed and credited. They were typically remediated within 1-2 business days (with some being fixed in as little as 4-6 hours).

Source: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here’s What We Found, an article by Sam Curry.

A Guide to Deep Learning and Neural Networks

As a subset of artificial intelligence, deep learning lies at the heart of various innovations: self-driving cars, natural language processing, image recognition and so on. Companies that deliver DL solutions (such as Amazon, Tesla, Salesforce) are at the forefront of stock markets and attract impressive investments. According to Statista, the total funding of artificial intelligence startup companies worldwide in 2014–2019 is equal to more than $26 billion. This high interest can be explained by the amazing benefits of deep learning and its architectures — artificial neural networks.

Source: A Guide to Deep Learning and Neural Networks, an article by Yulia Gavrilova.

Announcing Swift Algorithms

I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.

Algorithms are powerful tools for thought because they encapsulate difficult-to-read and error-prone raw loops. The Algorithms package includes a host of powerful, generic algorithms frequently found in other popular programming languages. We hope this new package will help people embrace algorithms, improving the correctness and performance of their code.

Source: Announcing Swift Algorithms, an article by Nate Cook.